Starting in the fall of 1978 I got involved with what's generally called
"Mail Art". I never liked that term because I don't like the term
"art" as a category for creativity. As such, I preferred called
myself a "PIN-UP" for "Postal Interaction Network - Underground
Participant". Within Mail Art one might say that there're various threads:
one of the most common is people who just try to get their name out there
as much as possible by submitting generally theme-irrelevant work to every
Mail Art show they can find out about. A much smaller group of people that
included myself & "Blaster" Al Ackerman was more inclined
to pranking, using multiple identities, & more intense actual personal
communication (rather than, say, sending out the same post-card with no
personal message to thousands of people). At my peak, I was corresponding
with 1,400 people & managing to keep track of who everyone was &
what I sent them & what they sent me. The personal bureaucracy that
I had to maintain to do this burnt me out so much it took the fun out of
it. One of the many projects I had was to pretend that there was a fan club
for everyone I was corresponding with. I would use a rubber stamp kit to
make a stamp of their name followed by "fan club" & I would
stamp it on a slew of envelopes. Everytime I'd create a new 'fan club' I'd
add that stamp to whatever remained of this supply. Then when I'd send that
person mail they'd see their own 'fan club' listed + all the other 'fan
clubs' I was up to. The above image is of a sample envelope. People 'in
the know' about who these people are will probably find the above list quite
interesting.